Plain text accounting with ledger

After ten years of everyday use of
GnuCash, I finally came to the true
Unix technology: plain text for the log, and
command line utilities to query it.

There are my concerns with GnuCach:

Transactions can be logged and queried only within the application

The log consumes space on the encrypted storage (~4 MB after 3 years)

Takes time to open

Once hit a bug: couldn’t save new transactions, had to go for sqlite file format

I need a tiny fraction of GnuCash functionality.

And there I came across a post ledger is
awesome. The idea is
brilliant! There are tools to create ledger log from GnuCash: on the
wiki. Three-year history
occupies 800 Kb of plain text (Cyrillic, utf8). It took a minute to start new
log with the same equity.

One more goody: vim-ledger to let vim
know syntax and semantics of the log file. Illustration: